


Prank Regents

by asamis_jodhpurs



Category: RWBY
Genre: Accidental Cuddling, Crack Treated Seriously, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Hijinks & Shenanigans, I threw a Chibi plot into the canon timeline and this is the result, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Sharing a Bed, because Mercury, takes place after V6C9
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27051238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asamis_jodhpurs/pseuds/asamis_jodhpurs
Summary: Panicking over an unplanned moment of emotional intimacy, Emerald and Mercury decide that they can't afford to stay in the Evernight any longer. This, Emerald decides, is exactly the kind of problem that can be solved with a prank war.
Relationships: Mercury Black/Emerald Sustrai
Comments: 48
Kudos: 85





	1. The Slope

**Author's Note:**

> So, this work was originally intended to be only the five chapters that follow this one, but I still had to get some angst out of my system from working on my longer fic before I could successfully write anything silly, so this work will essentially be one mostly serious follow-up to V6C9 followed immediately by what are essentially five episodes of Looney Tunes. I, uh, hope everybody's cool with that!
> 
> Also, if you've been reading Loved by (Almost) No One, please consider this my formal apology for Chapter Nine. My plan is essentially to post a chapter of this on every week that I post one of the darker chapters of that. 
> 
> Happy reading!

This was clearly unacceptable.

It was a blip. An unacceptable blip, and one that neither Emerald nor Mercury was willing to take responsibility for.

Really, they couldn’t be _blamed._ It was a clear-cut slippery-slope situation. They’d had the most professional of intentions.

It had been natural, after the day Tyrian had knocked Mercury to the floor, stinger hovering inches from his chin, and left the two of them standing side by side, both frightened and angry and breathing too hard, that Emerald and Mercury would want to _stay_ side by side. With the attack on Haven over and failed and Cinder off gods knew where, Emerald and Mercury’s only real job was to keep themselves from getting killed, and it was much easier to not get killed when they were together, watching each other’s backs.

And if Emerald had quietly set her jaw and resolved that she would fire _Thief’s_ _Respite_ straight into Tyrian’s face the next time he tried to touch Mercury, well, that wasn’t something that Mercury needed to know.

And if Mercury started making a point of walking behind Emerald so that anyone who tried to ambush them would have to deal with him first, that was none of her business.

This watching-each-other’s-backs arrangement was completely professional, and it was equally professional that they figure out a way to continue said arrangement during the hours when they needed to sleep.

So, when they’d reached Emerald’s door that night and Mercury had turned to go and all the dark, winding hallways that he would have to walk alone in order to get to his own room had flashed through her mind, she’d said, “Stay.”

And he’d stayed.

That was Slip Number One.

Slip Number Two came about a few nights later.

Mercury quickly discovered that sleeping on the cold stone floor of Evernight castle was one of the most wretchedly uncomfortable experiences of his life, which, given how his life had gone up until this point, was saying a _lot._ The flagstones dug into his back, and the creeping chill made his legs ache where they met his prosthetics.

_Note to self: When Salem’s in a better mood, bribe Hazel to ask her to look into central heating._

There was a rough voice in his head, like there always was, telling him that the aches and the chills didn’t matter, that if he was a real assassin and not just a pathetic excuse for one, he’d tough it out. That his prosthetics wouldn’t be bothering him if he’d fought well enough to keep his legs.

He didn’t understand how that voice could still be so clear, two years after he’d killed its owner.

But the lack of sleep was making him snappish and clumsy during the day, and that would make it harder for him to watch Emerald’s back if Tyrian decided to try his hand (his tail?) at actually murdering them.

It wasn’t weak to seek out better sleeping conditions. It was practical.

That was what he told himself as he levered himself up on one arm, his armor scraping quietly against the floor.

There was a little gasp to the left of him, and he looked over to see Emerald sitting bolt upright in a baggy sleep shirt with _Thief’s Respite_ pointed at his face.

Well, at least she was taking watch duty seriously.

“You know, I’m pretty sure I started sleeping in this room so that I could _avoid_ getting murdered,” he said.

Emerald lowered the revolver, looking sheepish. “Sorry. I’m, uh, a little twitchy.” She cradled the weapon close to her chest, like it was a teddy bear and not a loaded firearm. “Obviously.”

Now that the risk of being inadvertently shot in the face by his partner was out of the picture, Mercury sat up the rest of the way, ready to haggle a blanket or two out of her. They’d do almost nothing against the unrelenting cold of the flagstones, but Mercury had learned long ago that the difference between “nothing” and “almost nothing” was actually bigger than most people thought.

Emerald got that. He saw it in the careful way she polished her revolvers, in the way she ate every meal like she knew her next wasn’t guaranteed.

“So, uh, you couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

Mercury shook his head.

“Tyrian?” Her shoulders hunched in a little, and Mercury would deck that laughing-mad freak in the face the next time he saw him for making Emerald curl in on herself like that.

He shook his head. “Just the floor.”

“Oh! Right. Sorry.”

Half the time Emerald said, “Sorry,” it was just completely baffling, and this instance easily fell into that half.

“What for?”

“Well, we could have been trading out,” she said, that apologetic note still in her voice. Hell, he didn’t know what an apology that didn’t come from Emerald would sound like. He’d never gotten one from anyone else. “I could take the floor during my watch shifts, and you could—”

And at that point, she let out an affronted squawk as Mercury took her up on that offer before she could retract it by flinging himself up onto the narrow bed and rolling across her to land on her other side. The squawk turned into a laugh partway through, then morphed into a squeal of indignation as he planted both hands on her side and shoved.

“Hey!” Emerald exclaimed, toppling out of the bed and landing on the floor.

“My bed now,” Mercury said, burying his face in the pillow and settling into the nice warm space she’d left behind. “No take-backs.”

“You know, that You-Getting-Murdered option is starting to sound pretty good right now,” she grumbled, and Mercury found himself smiling into the pillow. Em was cute when she was grumpy.

And that was a sentence he needed to add to one of his (worryingly numerous) Boxes That Should Not Be Opened Under Any Circumstances. The box of Emerald-related content in that designation was starting to get… unwieldy.

Attachments made you stupid. Mercury knew that. But every time he managed to cut one off, Emerald would do something else that made a hook catch under his ribs.

So even as he rolled onto his back in that nice patch of warmth, his armor slowly starting to feel less like ice, a part of his mind was still hooked, still reaching toward Emerald where she sat hunched against the wall.

She was shivering. Her voice rattled a little every time she exhaled. He could almost see her hugging herself, rubbing her hands up and down her arms.

That wasn’t his problem. It shouldn’t have mattered. But his brain wouldn’t switch off when all it had to picture was Emerald looking small and cold and miserable.

“Would you cut that out?” he said, looking over at Emerald. He was right. She _had_ been doing that hugging-herself thing. She’d always done it when it was her turn to take watch, even back in Vale.

She glared at him. “Oh, I’m sorry, is the fact that I’m freezing to death disrupting your beauty sleep?”

“Yeah,” he said, smirking. “It is. If I go another night like this, all my hair’ll fall out, and I’ll become a wrinkled old geezer.”

Emerald tilted her head to the side. “You sure going bald wouldn’t be an improvement over wasting twenty minutes and an ungodly amount of hair gel every morning just to give yourself slightly different bedhead than you already wake up with?”

Ah, so she was shooting to kill.

And the problem was that on this topic, Mercury had no ammunition to fire back, no ammunition that was true, anyway. What was he supposed to say? “Oh yeah? Well _your_ hair is always shining and perfect no matter how long we’re on the run”?

Shit, that was more material for the box. Time to change the subject.

“Fine, you can have your bed back.”

Slip Number Two.

“Oh, thank gods!” Mercury had to scoot over some and abandon the warm patch as Emerald scrambled up over the side of the bed and cocooned herself in the blankets, her eyes shining before sliding shut in contentment.

That… that definitely wasn’t the cutest thing he’d ever seen. He definitely didn’t have a mental register of cute things he’d seen on which all the entries involved Emerald.

He almost forgot to be annoyed that she’d stolen all the blankets even though it was his turn to sleep.

Almost.

Before he could say anything, though, Emerald sat up, looking at him funny. “Aren’t you gonna… go back to the floor?”

“ _Gods,_ no.” It had been weeks since his legs had bugged him so little.

“But, if I’m in the bed and you’re not leaving the bed, isn’t it kind of…?”

Shit. Shit. It was definitely kind of. But he was too tired to move, and he needed Emerald not to be cold, so he threw on a smirk.

“You wish.”

_I wish. I know I shouldn’t._

“Jerk,” Emerald muttered.

“Correct,” he said. He needed her to keep that in mind before she gave him a chance to screw anything up.

“Just take your greaves off, alright? They make me nervous.” The fact that she was still holding _Thief’s Respite_ made that seem a little ridiculous.

Mercury’s eyes flicked to her weapon, then to her face. He raised an eyebrow.

Emerald scowled. “ _Thief’s Respite_ won’t go off and blow a hole in the wall of our tent if I sleep-kick.”

Mercury groaned. “Em, it was _one time—”_

_“Off.”_

He sat up grumbling and swung his legs over the side of the bed, half-expecting her to pay him back by shoving him onto the floor. But she just sat there, watching him with an intent look that made him think too hard about what he was doing and screw up undoing the clasps and the laces.

His boots came away with his greaves, and his feet clanked against the floor. He shivered a little, his armor cold and heavy around his shoulders. With his greaves and boots on, it was easier, even with the aches and the clanking, to let go of the fact that the only thing connecting his knee to his ankle on each side was a plain steel bar with a pneumatic tube running down it. He’d never tell anyone, but there were times when he looked down at that spare metal and all he could think of was the feeling of Marcus's knife digging into the struggling muscle that it had replaced.

_If I'd been faster..._

“You’ve been sleeping in your armor.”

Mercury started, kicking his boots aside. Emerald seemed closer than she’d been when he’d zoned out, and she was leaning forward, biting her lip with a frown of—he was going to guess concern.

He didn’t like how good she was getting at knowing when he felt weak.

“Yeah,” he said, “real keen observation there, Em.”

But she didn’t lean back or flinch away like she would’ve before that fight they’d had in the hallway.

“Don’t be a dick,” she said. “It just—no wonder you spend all day shambling around like a Creep.”

“I do _not_ shamble. I might, from time to time, _meander,_ but—”

He stopped talking, then, because Emerald reached out brushed her fingers against the buckle that fastened his armor to his forearm. They hovered there, waiting, so light he could barely feel them, and killed every coherent thought in his head.

“You’d sleep better,” she said, and there was a look in her eyes that was almost defiant, like she was daring him to push her away.

He didn’t want to push her away.

Slip Number Three.

“You make a point,” he said, looking down at his knees.

“I do,” said Emerald, and then her quick pickpocket’s fingers were moving up the inside of his arm, undoing the fastenings that held the cold metal against his skin.

He wasn’t sure when he’d gotten so okay with Emerald touching him. Cinder had tried that creepy face-stroking thing she was always doing to Torchwick on him pretty early on, and he’d nearly bitten her hand off. She’d tried a different angle after that, sneaking up in his blind spot to run fingers down the scars on his arms and coo over them in that creepy, cloying way she had.

Boy, did he not miss her.

The third time she’d tried that, he’d stormed out of camp and come back with his armor, and that had put a welcome end to Cinder trying to use anything but brute force to control him.

There was none of that in the way Emerald touched him. She didn’t gloat over peeling layers of him away. She just did it—quiet and methodical with a little frown of concentration on her face. Her hands were gentle in a way that made Mercury feel light-headed, but they were doing a job.

He could’ve done that job himself, with a little more fumbling and effort. He probably _should_ have done it himself. He was slipping.

But he was too tired to give a damn, and there was something soothing about watching Emerald work, the way she gritted her teeth when a buckle gave her trouble and smiled like she was proud when it finally gave way.

“Other side,” she said, pulling the last plate from his right shoulder.

Instead of arguing, Mercury turned, offering her his left arm to work on without saying a word. Sleep was starting to drag on his limbs now, and he found himself leaning, just a little, into her hands. He was used to holding his ground, to not flinching when someone drove a punch at his face, but apparently he wasn’t capable of keeping up that same unwavering posture when Em’s fingers were skimming up the inside of his arm, making him shiver even as they pulled him free of the things that were making him cold.

His arms weren’t used to being touched lightly. None of him was. The feeling was so unfamiliar it almost scared him.

And he wanted more of it.

Shit.

He was going to need a bigger box.

“Hey,” said Emerald, her hands almost up to his shoulder, and he startled, suddenly scared that she might have heard the stupid, unprofessional things he was thinking.

Gods, if her Semblance ever evolved so that she could read minds instead of just giving them a spin, he’d need to swan-dive into one of the Pits, Salem-style.

“Yeah?”

“I’ve… been meaning to say sorry.” Emerald looked away for a second, her fingers stumbling. “About the whole attacking-you thing.”

And Mercury actually let out a tired laugh, because that sentence probably had Marcus Black rolling in his shallow grave.

“I’d’ve attacked me too, Em,” he said. And it was true. He’d been right, but he’d been a jerk about it. When he was younger, if anyone had told him the truth about Marcus the way he’d told her the truth about Cinder… he probably would have done the exact same thing Emerald had. “It’s no big deal. ‘M used to it.”

“Yeah, but—” Emerald tugged the last piece of armor from his shoulder and looked down at it—“the things you’re used to kind of suck, and I don’t—I’d like to be different.”

He looked at her, at those bright red eyes that always lit up with hope and excitement when Cinder approached only to fall into disappointment. There was a little sliver of that hope in them again, for the first time since Haven. And it was for _him_.

Something tightened in Mercury’s throat, but he swallowed it down and kept his voice from shaking. “You’re different, Em.”

Emerald’s eyes lingered on his face a moment longer before she sat back and took up her post at the headboard. “Good.”

With the heavy chill of his armor gone, it was easy for Mercury to sink under the blankets. In the minute before his eyes slid shut, he looked up at Emerald, _Thief’s Respite_ clutched to her chest, her eyes anxious and alert.

He wondered how many nights she’d spent that way, holed up in a corner of an alley with no one to watch her back.

The thought floating in his head when sleep claimed him was, _I’d like to be different for you, too._

* * *

If questioned, Emerald would feel perfectly comfortable laying the blame for Slip Number Two squarely at Mercury’s cybernetic feet. Slips Number Three and, most disastrously, Four, though, were not _entirely_ not her fault.

She wouldn’t admit it even at gunpoint, but… she kind of liked sharing a bed with her ~~partner~~ ~~best friend~~ least horrible co-worker. She could scrape together at least a couple of sensible reasons for why she felt that way, but underneath those reasons, things got… concerning.

It did make keeping watch easier. Knowing that Mercury, the most ridiculously light sleeper she’d ever met, would feel it if she dropped off during a watch shift and would never let her live it down made it easier to press through those lonely, wakeful hours. And having him right there… made those hours feel a little less lonely. Also—and the fact that she’d noticed this enough to add it to the list was probably creepy—Mercury looked softer in his sleep. Without his armor and that permanent scowl he’d worn since they’d gotten back from Haven, he looked a lot less like a professional hitman and a lot more like just—a boy.

It made him look like someone who could get hurt if she failed to keep a watch on that door, so Emerald kept her hands braced on _Thief’s Respite_ and her eyes open, because that was what the boy sleeping beside her trusted her to do.

As for the non-watch shifts, it was maybe a little mercenary to think of her only remaining ally in terms of his efficacy as a space heater, but that didn’t change the fact that Mercury was an _excellent_ space heater once she’d pried the armor from his arms. Curling up with her back against his side was _so_ much better than feeling the cold, drafty air of the Keep creep up her spine in the night. In a life of scrounging, that kind of luxury made her feel like she’d carried off a truly nefarious heist.

The other reasons were smaller.

She didn’t have to say good-bye to him anymore. She’d always hated “good-bye.” Too many people had thrown it in her face like a smoke bomb and vanished into the mist.

During her watch shifts, she did maintenance on _Thief’s Respite,_ keeping the blades sharp and the chains neatly stowed and the metal polished to a shine. The routine kept her hands busy and her mind alert, and she attended to it every night with a diligence that would have made an Atlesian Specialist weep for joy.

And by the third night of their bed-sharing arrangement, when Mercury had gently prodded her awake for her watch shift around three, she’d opened her eyes to see all the tiny screwdrivers and bottles of finish laid out neatly on the nightstand, exactly how she liked them.

He’d already been asleep—or pretending to be—by the time she said, “Thank you.”

She guessed it was his way of repaying her for helping him out of his armor each night, which—Emerald liked that part of the arrangement a lot. And that was _troubling._

But there was something about the way Mercury exhaled when she was done, eyes sliding shut for a second, shoulders relaxing into her hands, that she wanted to repeat.

So, she repeated it. Shamelessly.

And they started to talk to each other like they had at Beacon again, before the drawn-out darkness of the Evernight. She rolled her eyes at his jokes, and he made fun of her, and she sniped back, and the world started to feel a little smaller. No matter how miserable Tyrian and Watts managed to make her waking hours, Emerald had somewhere warm to go at the end of them. Life wasn’t a long nightmare now, just a series of days, parts of them pretty okay, and that was enough.

On the fifth night of the new arrangement, the day before the bullhead was slated to arrive to take Watts and Tyrian to Atlas, Slip Number Four took place, and it took place on Emerald’s watch.

It had been a shitty day. Tyrian hadn’t outright attacked them, but the creep’s respect for personal space was completely nonexistent, and he was acting even more freaksome than usual.

The real problem, though, was Salem. They never saw her, but they heard her. Far up in the highest towers, continuing to throw the tantrum that had begun the second she’d found out her ex’s latest incarnation had entered the picture.

And breaking glass.

That wasn’t a problem for Emerald. But it was for Mercury.

She’d never said anything about it, but she’d noticed, from time to time. The night she’d dropped a plate while they were cleaning up a failed cooking experiment in their dorm at Beacon and Mercury had startled back like a bullet had grazed his head—the way he’d bolted out of the great hall the second the windows had started to spiderweb.

Sometimes, Emerald thought about what Mercury’s father must have done to him to make him flinch and shake that way at something as small as a piece of glass hitting the floor. And then she bit the inside of her cheek to keep down a scream of rage.

And that godsdamned sound had rung through every corner of the castle for _hours._ That meant that Mercury spent most of the day clenching his hands into fists and staring off into the middle distance, and that Emerald spent most of the day thinking about how satisfying it would be to dig up Marcus Black and shoot him again.

When she took Mercury’s armor off that night, there was no sigh. His shoulders stayed rigid. He tossed and turned for a long time before he finally rolled onto his back and went still.

Emerald was about two hours into her watch and had just finished up the last of her maintenance on _Thief’s Respite_ when Mercury made a sound that scared her.

It wasn’t a loud sound. If the room wasn’t so creepily silent, she probably wouldn’t have heard it at all.

It was a small, animal whine of fear and pain, and Emerald knew, instantly, that something was shattering inside her partner’s head. She tossed _Thief’s Respite_ onto the floor without a second thought and turned toward him.

His face was tensed in a pained grimace, brows knitting together, lips pulled back so that his teeth glinted in the dim light, jaw shifting and clenching, like he was trying to talk but couldn’t.

The sight lodged in Emerald’s chest like shrapnel, and she reached for him in a panic, scared she’d hurt him but sure down to her bones that she had to find a way to make this stop.

She caught his shoulder and shook it, trying to be gentle, but the muscles under her hand felt locked into place.

“Merc!” she whispered. “Mercury, wake up! Merc, it’s me, wake up!”

He made the sound again, and she thought _I’m glad you burned his house till it was nothing but ash,_ and she shook him harder because she didn’t know what else to do.

Mercury gasped, his eyes flashing open, his shoulders loosening a fraction. Emerald let out the breath she’d been holding, but something still wasn’t right. Mercury’s gaze was vacant and confused, his breathing heavy, like she’d only partly succeeded in dragging him out of a place that was much, much worse than Evernight Keep.

“Merc?”

Still with that muddled look, he stared up at her, his eyes tracing over her face. “Em…?”

“Yeah,” she said, relief welling up in her chest and threatening to drown her.

Mercury exhaled shakily, like he had the same drowning feeling that she did, and then, so quickly that she barely realized what he was doing, he rolled up onto his elbow, flinging an arm over her middle and burying his face in her side.

Emerald’s hands flew up in confusion, then lowered slowly. Mercury’s arm tightened around her waist, pulling her close like she was somewhere he wanted to hide and something he wanted to protect all at once.

No one had ever held her that way before. Her hands hovered over him, uncertain. He was still breathing too heavy, too fast, his fingers pressing into her waist. The one eye she could see was shut tight.

If he’d surfaced out of sleep at all, he hadn’t stayed above water for more than a second or two. And wherever he was, he was still fighting. Before she could think it through, she let one of her arms sink onto his, holding him to her so that he wouldn’t have to cling on alone.

His breathing was still ragged, but it slowed. The arm over her waist softened a little.

Okay. Okay. That had helped.

She let her other hand settle in his hair, carefully smoothing it away from the places where a cold sweat had glued it to his forehead, trying, in the smallest way, to put him back in order.

Emerald had tried to do this for Cinder, after Beacon, haunting her bedside like a ghost, but it wasn’t long before her good hand learned to slap again, before it became clear that all she wanted Emerald for was a mouthpiece.

Emerald had been okay with that. It meant that she was needed, and being needed was something like being loved, right?

This felt different. Warmer. Scarier, but not because she thought he’d hurt her.

When she was twelve, she’d pulled off her first big jewel heist, a pretty purple amethyst that glittered in the cupped palm of her hand, unfathomably valuable and fragile as glass. Watching the sunlight flicker around its edges, she’d felt rich and powerful and unspeakably terrified that she might drop it and see it shatter into nothing.

That was how holding Mercury felt.

Gods, if he ever found out she’d thought that, he’d probably sue her for defamation of character.

But that couldn’t stop her from thinking it, and it didn’t stop her from moving her fingers through his hair, keeping his head tucked against her side as his breathing slowed and grew quiet. She kept him close, and they rode out the nightmare together.

Maybe it would have made sense to pick up _Thief’s Respite_ again and turn her eyes back to the door once Mercury’s face had gone still and tranquil. But Emerald couldn’t help feeling like this watch was more important than the one that kept Tyrian at bay.

She spent the rest of her shift with her arms around her partner, standing guard against a ghost.

When it was time for her to wake Mercury up for his shift, she found she couldn’t do it. As the hours had ticked by, he’d grown heavy and warm, molding himself to the shape of her so that they curled neatly together—his head to her ribs, her arm over his, his chest rising and falling against her hip, a metal knee flung over her shin.

Emerald felt _held_ for once, and she couldn’t make herself ruin it. So she told herself she’d keep watch just a little longer, let Mercury catch up on the sleep the nightmare had stolen from him.

It wasn’t long before that unfamiliar feeling of peace made her eyelids heavy, made her fingers go clumsy, then still, in the softest patches of Mercury’s hair, the warmth and the weight of him pulling her towards sleep.

_Screw it._

She wouldn’t be any use against Tyrian, not as bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived as she was. And Mercury wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her.

She let herself sink down onto her back, sliding under the blankets and smiling as the Evernight cold released her. She was conscious, vaguely, of Mercury’s head sliding up to her shoulder, his arm gathering her closer against his chest, and then a dreamless sleep carried her off.

Slip Number Four.

Emerald really should have known that when they woke up five hours later, tangled in each other’s arms at the foot of a slippery slope of their own creation, the result would be utter pandemonium.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next week, we'll find out how emotionally mature Em and Merc are going to be in handling this situation (Spoiler alert: the answer is "Not at all").
> 
> Thanks so much for reading! I love hearing what people think in the comments, so feel free to weigh in and say hi if you'd like. :)


	2. Waking Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they're idiots, Your Honor

When Mercury’s eyes opened, the only color in the world was green. His right arm was pinned under him at a weird angle and had completely fallen asleep, pins and needles running up it when he shifted his weight. There was a soft pressure on his left arm, which was flung over…

Green.

Uh-oh.

His head flicked up from where it had been buried in Emerald’s hair, pieces of the night before starting to come back to him: the shitty sleep that had led him straight back to the house he’d burned, to a whiskey bottle shattering against the wall beside his head and then—Emerald, her face appearing in the old cabin, Mercury lunging for her before Marcus could do the same. He had, after that, a vague memory of holding onto Emerald until Marcus was gone, his heart thudding against her ribs.

He had assumed that that had been part of the dream. Like an idiot.

But it hadn’t been a dream. He’d just grabbed his partner in the middle of the night with no explanation. Like an idiot.

He struggled to think through the shame.

Okay. If he could disentangle himself without waking her up, maybe nothing would happen. Maybe he could undo how weak he’d been, in Em’s eyes if not his own. He slid back an inch from the steady warmth of her side and the grapefruit smell of her hair, trying to maneuver out of the angle between her arm and her waist.

In her sleep, she frowned and made a small sound of protest. Her fingers pressed into his forearm, like they were trying to drag him back into place, like they thought he belonged curled up at her side, and it was kind of lovely, and _that_ was going straight into the box because if he let himself get used to—

Wait.

Emerald was asleep. Mercury had been asleep.

Nobody was keeping watch.

Alarm burned away what little drowsiness he had left. He wrenched his arm free of Emerald’s and flipped over onto his back, wishing he hadn’t agreed to take off his greaves. He sat up, his eyes seeking out the door. It was still closed. Their mistake hadn’t cost them too badly.

He looked down at Emerald, the way her hair fanned out around her head, the soft curling of her fingers. In another lapse of strength that should have earned him a punch to the gut, he let himself exhale, relieved their shared stupidity hadn’t brought disaster down on her.

Emerald’s eyes flickered open, then fixed on his face. Her mouth curved up in a small smile, and it occurred to him that she hadn’t shoved his arm away when he’d flung it over her, that she’d let herself fall asleep under it.

Something about that scared him.

He schooled his face back into a frown. Emerald’s smile turned sheepish, then sad. Her eyes darted away from his face and trained themselves on the wall.

“Right,” she said. Her fingers dug into the pillow. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it.”

And that was perfect, right? They could put this screw-up behind them and get back to the business of surviving.

Mercury decided to roll with it. Hell, he’d even try and let Em feel a little less like she’d completely failed watch duty.

“Yeah,” he said lightly. “No big deal.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed, started pulling his greaves and his boots back on.

“Nothing to write home about,” said Emerald, and, looking at his laces, he couldn’t see her, but her voice sounded funny, almost hollow.

Spying an opportunity to be obnoxious—he hadn’t had nearly enough of those lately—Mercury struck.

“Writing home,” he said. “How’re you gonna address that? ‘Dear Mistralian dumpster pigeons?’”

He expected to hear her groan in frustration or shoot a joke back, but she was silent.

He tried again. “I mean, mine’s just gonna be made out to ‘Giant Godsforsaken Pile of Ash,’ so you’ve really got a leg up on—”

“You’re an asshole.”

Mercury looked up. Emerald called him an asshole pretty often, but right now she actually sounded like she _meant_ it. She’d wrapped her arms around her knees, and she was glaring at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “What’s new?”

“Nothing, apparently.” Her shoulders hunched.

Mercury frowned. He’d been trying to let her off the hook, and now she was angry with him? “You know you could have gotten us—”

“The past few days—they haven’t felt different for you?”

Oh gods, she knew he’d been weak, and this was her way of not letting him off the hook about it. This was her asking him to fall down to her level, to be someone who would let himself get hurt, and he wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t. If he gave in now, if he let himself fall into how good it had felt to sleep with her close against his chest, he’d never get strong enough to be safe from Marc—Tyrian. He meant Tyrian.

“Lemme see, Em, we’re still locked in a fortress of eternal darkness with a serial killer who thinks we would be fun to murder, so I’m gonna say _no._ ” And that hurt her. He could see it in the way her eyebrows drew up in the middle.

She’d run, now, and remember that getting close to him wouldn’t make her any safer.

And he’d have the space to remember that letting her get close wasn’t worth the danger.

“Funny,” she said, and her eyes went hard. “I thought you were exactly where you were supposed to be.” She slung her holster around her waist and stood up, shoving her feet into her shoes.

Her words—his own, stolen, because Em had apparently never stopped thieving—landed like one of Xiao Long’s gauntlets to the chest.

“Where are you going?”

She frowned, thinking, and then threw more of his own words back in his face. “To have an identity crisis.” A little quieter, she added, “I don’t care if you think it’s stupid.”

And a different kind of shame rolled through him as he realized that he _had_ made her feel stupid. That he’d treated her like she was.

Was he any less a piece of shit than Cinder?

Emerald stormed past him, headed for the door, and he had to clasp his hands together to keep from reaching out and pulling her back.

“Em, you shouldn’t,” he said as she unlocked the door and pulled it open, “it’s not—”

The door slammed.

“—safe.”

The room was empty and dim, the bruise-like light somehow worse than total darkness. Without Emerald, it was too quiet.

What the hell _was_ he doing here?

Sure, Salem had promised him and Emerald the usual—power, riches, safety—but how safe would they actually be in her new world if it was a world where Tyrian was constantly breathing down their necks?

He reached for his armor where Em had laid it out on the nightstand, started buckling it back on. It was slow, awkward work, alone, trying to work the clasps one-handed.

There had to be a reason he belonged here, a reason that didn’t line up with the one Tyrian had taunted him with. He couldn’t still be running from Marcus, not after all this time, not after he’d killed the bastard.

Except… Marcus still followed him into his dreams. Marcus had built him to belong here, and that meant that belonging here—Mercury’s hand clenched into a fist—was letting Marcus win.

Another reason. There had to be another reason. Anything.

Only one came to mind.

_If I leave Em here, she’ll die._

Oh.

_Shit._

* * *

She never learned, did she? She never fucking learned.

Emerald stomped up the steps to one of the higher towers of the Keep, not caring who heard her.

She always did this. She always let herself think that she mattered to someone, and then she’d let that person walk all over her.

The gang of older kids who’d taken her in for a few weeks when she was thirteen only to ditch her the second her Semblance got them the jewels they were after. When she was fifteen, the boy who had said she was the little sister he’d never had, only to shove her into police lights and run the other way when their third job went pear-shaped.

She’d fought so hard to tell herself that Cinder wasn’t another bullet point on that list.

Emerald heaved up the creaking trapdoor at the top of the staircase and climbed up into the large, round room that was, she guessed, the Keep’s library. Bulging, cobwebbed shelves lined the walls, bowing under all the musty books they contained.

When she’d lived on the streets, she’d had a love for books, jealously hoarded the few she could get her hands on. They’d felt like troves of secret information that would make her too smart to let the world pull the wool over her eyes.

They hadn’t worked, apparently.

She’d discovered the library in the weeks after Beacon fell, in the hours she’d spent roaming the halls alone whenever Watts kicked her out of Cinder’s recovery room and she felt too fragile for Mercury’s needling.

Maybe because his needling was right.

When Emerald looked back on the day Cinder had cornered her in that alley, she could see how deep the hole she’d fallen into was, but she’d been made to dig it so gradually that she hadn’t noticed the slow descent from, _Cinder cares about me,_ to, _Cinder cares about me even though she says those things,_ to, _Cinder might say those things, but she would never hit me,_ to, _Cinder would never hit me if I didn’t deserve it._

Emerald paced the dusty floor of the library, shivering and running her fingers over the spines of the gardening books she used when she worked with Hazel.

The first thought she’d had on waking up this morning to find Mercury watching her, his eyes softer than she’d ever seen them, was, _Finally._ Finally, someone’s eyes went gentle when they met hers. Finally, someone wouldn’t run even when things went south.

And then he’d scowled, and her heart had shrunk, and her mind called out, before she could stop it, _Not Cinder again._

_That,_ Emerald decided, was plenty of material for a crisis of identity, no matter what Mercury said.

Her footsteps led her to the arched window in the library’s far wall. Through the iron lattice over the glass, the Evernight sprawled out before her—the aching purple sky blending with the stunted earth that lay riddled with pits of roiling black.

This was how Salem wanted to make the whole world. This was what Emerald was helping to build, and without Cinder’s hand at her back—without the constant threat of that hand bursting into flame if she didn’t obey—it was hard to see it as anything other than a nightmare.

It was time to wake up.

And if she had to wake up alone… maybe that was what she deserved at this point. Even if she liked Mercury’s jokes and his warmth and the trust he put in her, she couldn’t just keep clinging to whatever came along.

If he wanted to come with her, then that would be different. Maybe… She shook her head. That wouldn’t happen. She’d thought last night would be important, and from the way he’d brushed her off the second she’d woken up, it clearly hadn’t been.

Not for him at least.

But maybe, just in case, she would ask. Something about vanishing and leaving him here alone felt wrong in her stomach.

When she reached the foot of the stairs, a tuneless singing echoed down the hall.

_Tyrian._

Did he know, somehow, what she’d just decided? Was he already here to make good on his threat? Her hands clenched around _Thief’s Respite,_ and she froze. His eyesight wasn’t the best, so if she just stayed still and didn’t make any noise…

The singing grew quieter, quieter, then faded altogether.

Letting out a breath, Emerald crept out of the stairwell and then sprinted back to her room. The door was unlocked, so she figured Mercury was gone, leaving her behind again.

When she rushed through the door, Mercury stood up and wheeled around to face her. He’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, right where she’d left him. He didn’t look, at all, like someone who was where he was supposed to be. His armor was all crooked, like he’d lost patience while putting it on, and there was a scared look in his eyes.

He hadn’t left. Even though they’d fought, he’d waited for her.

Emerald froze.

Mercury hurried toward her, and she thought, for a second, that he was going to hug her, and her brain spun itself so completely in circles trying to figure out what the hell she would do if he did that she barely registered him brushing past her to re-lock the door.

She felt a little stupid after that.

“I heard the freak singing,” said Mercury, scowling at the door as he tested the handle to make sure the lock held. “You okay?”

Emerald’s brain, still suffering a bit from vertigo, brought itself to a halt. “Yeah. I dodged him.”

“Oh,” said Mercury. “Good.”

What followed was perhaps the most ruthlessly awkward silence of Emerald’s life. The two of them were facing one another, hemmed in between the bed and the wall and the door, and doing, Emerald thought, a pretty respectable job at looking anywhere but at each other.

To a spot somewhere over Mercury’s shoulder, she said, “Merc, I—”

But of course, he had to go and say, “Em, I—” at the exact same time, which forced them to start over.

She set her mouth in a line, determined to start first this time. She needed to speak her plan into existence before she could lose her nerve.

“Look, I can’t—”

“I think you—”

Gods, _again?_

“Emerald, this is _important,”_ he said, and she lost focus on that spot over his shoulder and found herself staring up into his face, the harsh set of his jaw.

“And what I have to say isn’t?” she snapped because he always did this, always acted like because he’d grown up in a slightly more flashy version of hell than the one she’d grown up in, he had the right to shoot down whichever of her feelings he saw as dumb.

“No, I—”

Damnit, she was going to lose her courage, and his face was too close to hers, and she _had_ to get this out before he could say anything to hold her back.

“Can you just let me—”

And at the same time, they both burst out, _“We have to get out of here!”_

Emerald startled back and saw Mercury do the same, his eyes widening.

“Shit,” he whispered, and Emerald understood, because it was real now, not just a nagging thought lurking in both of their minds. “How are we gonna do that?”

That question should have terrified Emerald, because plans had never been her job, because suggesting ideas to Cinder had been a pretty reliable way to get slapped, but a strange feeling of strength settled in her chest instead because she and Mercury were on the same page about one thing: they were a _we_ now.

She snapped her fingers. “The bullhead to Atlas. It shows up at sundown, right? If we can take it and get it through the portal, we should be home free!”

“And Watts and Tyrian are just going to let us hitch a ride?” Mercury raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms, leaning back in the way he did when he was trying too hard to be cool.

The fact that there was no wall behind him, just the bed, which he fell onto with a yelp of alarm while keeping his arms awkwardly crossed, kind of ruined the effect.

Emerald snickered and sat down beside him. But he made a good point. Every successful heist she’d ever carried off had run on misdirection.

“So, we keep them busy with something else,” she said. “Hazel, too. We draw them all over to the far side of the Keep and then make a run for the bullhead. Salem’s still busy pitching a fit, so we just get to the docks…”

“You hit the pilot with an illusion…” Mercury was starting to smirk now.

“And _bam!_ We’ve got our own airship.” She smiled. It was a bare skeleton of a plan, but it was _her_ plan, and that made it gleam like a diamond in her mind.

Mercury nodded, his eyebrows lifting a little. “It’s a start. Two things: one—” he raised a finger—“what are we gonna keep them busy with? And two—how are we gonna not get swallowed by a Wyvern on the way out?”

Crap. Those were good questions.

Emerald let out a groan and slumped back onto the bed beside him, arm brushing armor. “I have no idea.”

She and Mercury had always been the ones taking orders, never the ones figuring out what those orders should be. How the hell was she supposed to apply a minion skillset to an overlord plan?

She stared at the ceiling, thinking, running back over all the time she and Mercury had been partners. When had they had ideas that didn’t come from Cinder? And on the not-getting-swallowed-by-a-Wyvern front, when had they been happy? Both of them had things in their pasts that could draw every Grimm for miles around if they made the mistake of thinking about it too hard.

An image came back to her, one she’d seen around a doorframe while hiding a laugh behind her hand: Mercury, squinting, tongue between his lips in an expression of gravest concentration as he applied a generous coating of superglue to the inner brim of Torchwick’s bowler hat, and the way his face lit up in epiphany a moment later, as he got the idea of turning the bottle onto the handle of Torchwick’s cane.

Emerald found herself smiling at the memory. It had taken Torchwick six hours and some unorthodox precision sword-work on Neo’s part to get his precious hair free. He hadn’t been able to get any work out of Emerald and Mercury all day, he was so distracted.

Emerald sat bolt upright. “I have an idea!”

“Yeah?”

“It’s one of yours, actually.”

Mercury smirked and folded his arms behind his head. “Must be pretty good, then.”

Emerald rolled her eyes. “You’re too modest," she deadpanned. “What do you say to a prank war?”

Mercury chuckled. “Yeah, that was one of my better… wait.” He frowned. “You got me set on _fire_ last time.”

Emerald grinned sheepishly. “You got better.”

_“On. Fire.”_

“Yep!” said Emerald, deciding to try another tactic. “Which means that I am now the reigning Prank Queen. If we were to have a rematch, though, there’s a chance—a _tiny_ chance, mind you—that you could take the crown.”

Mercury was silent for a moment before a crooked grin took over his face. “Dibs on Tyrian.”

Emerald shuddered. “He’s all yours. I’ll take Hazel.” There had to be some way she could use his gardening to keep him diverted.

“Which leaves me with Watts.” Mercury sat up and got to his feet. “My room’s right over his lab.”

“Gods,” said Emerald, “how did you sleep in there?” She’d never actually gone into Watts’s lab, and there were always enough metallic screeches and weird smells emanating from the place that she had no desire to change that state of affairs.

Mercury smiled like he was proud of his answer. “I _didn’t.”_

And feeling a little daring, Emerald stood up beside him. “You are ridiculously lucky that I let you into my bed.”

Emerald decided that watching Mercury’s entire face go pink in less than a second had definitely been worth the risk. It was a small, kind of ridiculous sign that maybe her hopes weren’t totally unfounded—that he cared more than he meant to.

She smiled and decided not to press him any further. “Breathe, okay? You’ve got a mad scientist to prank.”

Mercury nodded, eyes re-focusing. He stuck out a hand. “May the best man—or girl? ‘Person’ sounds lame—screw it. May the best whatever win.”

Emerald shook it, feeling like she was striking a good bargain. They were in this together. She definitely didn’t race to commit the feeling of his hand in hers to memory. Absolutely not.

She raised her head. “Let’s do this.”

Mercury nodded once, and they started out the door side by side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let the shenanigans begin! (Sometime next weekend...)
> 
> Thanks so much for reading :)


	3. Climbing Spikes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mercury fires the first shot in the prank war.

Even by Evernight standards, Mercury’s bedroom was depressing.

Emerald had at least hung up a couple sheets as curtains, tried to set what few keepsakes she had along the walls so that the space would feel a little like it was hers. Mercury had clearly taken one look at his room, dropped his duffel bag at the foot of his bed, and decided to put forth absolutely no effort to make the room look any less like the glorified prison cell that it was.

She couldn’t believe he hadn’t even tried to cover up the massive black stain on the wall. In the gloom, it seemed three-dimensional and far too Ursa-shaped for Emerald’s peace of mind.

“What the hell made that?” she asked, nose wrinkling.

“Yeahhhh, I’ve put a lot of effort into not finding out,” said Mercury. He crossed to the window and unlatched it, letting the cold winds sweep in and stir his hair. Emerald shivered as she joined him and didn’t think about how nice it would feel to nestle against his side until she was warm.

“Hmmm,” he said, peering down the sheer black bricks between his own window and the one that opened onto Watts’s lab. “If I just had…” He glanced at Emerald, then tilted his head to the side, looking down her back at—

Emerald’s face went hot. “Are you checking out my—”

“Revolvers?” Mercury said innocently. At the look on her face, he smirked. “Gods, Sustrai, when you moved out of the gutter, did you just leave your mind there?”

She swatted the back of his head. “Asshole. Stop kidding around.”

“During our very serious prank war?”

“During our prank war that will _literally determine whether or not Tyrian kills us?”_

Mercury heaved a sigh. “Work, work, work.” He paused for a second. “Seriously, though, I need your revolvers.”

Emerald pulled free one half of _Thief’s Respite,_ eyes narrowing in suspicion. “What for?”

“Grappling hook,” he said, crossing back to the box where he kept all the tools he used to maintain his legs. He pulled out a flathead screwdriver, tossed it back and forth between his hands a couple times.

“That should do it,” he muttered to himself.

“Do what?” Emerald asked, still cradling _Thief’s Respite_ and somewhat mistrustful of his intentions toward it.

“Lockpick,” he said, holding up the screwdriver before pocketing it.

“Hey,” said Emerald, a little indignant that he was intruding on her professional turf, “that’s _my_ thing!”

“I’m not allowed to be well-rounded?” Mercury shot back with a look of mock hurt on his face as he joined her at the window again.

Emerald snickered a little at that, despite her best efforts not to.

“Now, if you’ll just hand me that—” he reached for _Thief’s Respite_ —“I can pay the good doctor a visit.”

“You seriously don’t know how to work this,” Emerald said, but she let him take it out of her hands on the grounds that _Thief’s Respite_ would do more damage to Mercury than Mercury could do to _Thief’s Respite._

“Please,” he said, infinitely self-assured. “I’m an expert in all forms of—”

The falx blade sprang out suddenly, and he flinched, shooting off an earth Dust round that ricocheted off the walls before landing over the stain and coating it in a layer of rock. _Thief’s Respite_ fell out of his hands.

Emerald caught it before it could hit the floor and beamed down at it. She’d built the weapon herself, completely disregarding all standard procedures for the layout of a firearm. Gleaming and well-maintained as it was, it was the improvised weapon of a street thief, totally incomprehensible to any expert who didn’t know it personally.

“You were saying?” she said, and something about the dumbstruck look on Mercury’s face made her heart beat faster, driven by a weird stirring of pride.

“How the hell did you design that trigger mechanism?” he said, leaning forward eagerly. “It’s totally fucked up.” The way he said it, it sounded strangely like a compliment.

Emerald smiled, basking in it. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get out of here… nerd.”

In the end, Emerald had to brace herself against the window frame while holding a revolver with both hands, letting Mercury hang at the end of the chain like the world’s most smug, misanthropic fishing lure. She watched him draw level with the window, silver hair glinting in the dim light, and drop onto the windowsill in a crouch. He made quick enough work of the lock that she couldn’t help but give a little nod of respect, and then he was gone, drawing the chain in after him.

Heartbeat loud in her ears, Emerald waited.

One tug on the line meant he needed more slack. Two, that he needed her to shorten it a little.

Three tugs, they had agreed, meant, _“Pull me up right now for the love of gods.”_

Emerald felt a single tug on the line and spooled out a yard or two more of chain. There was a loud _clank_ from below her feet, and Emerald really hoped that it was part of Mercury’s plan. For two minutes, there was silence.

And then she heard the gunshots—the rapid fire of Mercury’s greaves. And then something shattering.

Emerald was already hitting the retraction trigger by the time the three tugs on the chain arrived. Mercury came flying out of the window, legs wheeling as he fired more shots back into the lab, and Emerald’s relief at seeing that he was all right was so strong that it scared her.

When he drew level with her, Mercury flipped over her shoulder, keeping ahold of the chain as he landed and reaching for the bag where he kept his spare munitions.

“That was quick,” said Emerald, still a little shaken.

“Lab’s haunted,” Mercury replied, hurrying back toward the window with the extra rounds in hand.

“What?”

Tossing the rounds into the air and swinging a kick through them to reload his greaves, he said again, “Lab’s haunted,” and then dove out the window.

Emerald shot out some more chain for him and then stuck her head out the window just in time to see him vanish headfirst into Watts’s lab. A guttural roar that sounded distinctly inhuman made the floor rattle beneath her feet.

A series of crashes and gunshots rang out, and Emerald couldn’t help but wonder if Mercury’s entire plan had just been, “Go smash stuff up.” If that was the case, it sounded like he was succeeding, but she couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that he wasn’t shaping up to be a very worthy competitor for her crown.

Three tugs. Emerald hit the retraction trigger and braced a foot against the wall. The chain strained for a second, like something on the other end had gotten ahold of Mercury, and she gritted her teeth, determined to beat whatever it was, and then the chain was reeling in swiftly, and Mercury came rocketing back through the window with a grin on his face.

“Em, put the chain back out, you gotta see this!”

“See what?” Emerald asked, raising an eyebrow even as she did what he asked and tied the revolver end of the chain around the leg of his bed so that they could both climb down.

“A masterpiece,” he said, swinging a leg over the windowsill and sliding down the chain. Emerald followed him, fighting down a jangling of nerves at venturing out into the cold winds where the Grimm could reach them.

She joined Mercury on the narrow stone sill of the latched, arching window of Watts’s lab and peered through to see a level of mayhem that was genuinely impressive.

An active flamethrower was wheeling through the air. And so was the largest chainsaw Emerald had ever seen. And a katana glowing with hard-light Dust. And some kind of laser sword. All those items were slicing through counters, throwing samples into disarray, and making, overall, a horrible mess of the fussy Atlesian’s workspace. The blades all joined up to a center of roiling blackness.

“How…” she muttered to herself before turning to Mercury. “Is that…?”

“A Gheist,” he said smugly. “I saw it when I needed some maintenance on my legs after Haven. Watts had it all caged up somehow for gods know what. Took most of my clip to break the lock but—” he shrugged as the flamethrower belched fire over a table of beakers full of a brightly colored liquid that exploded instantaneously—“I think the results speak for themselves.” He smirked. “I’m taking that crown.”

She could envision him leaping and whirling over counters, throwing out all of Watts’s most destructive prototypes for the Grimm to pick up. It was… kind of awesome, but Mercury didn’t need to know that.

“I guess it’s a _decent_ start,” said Emerald grudgingly, already plotting out ways she could ramp up the level of destruction in her own prank in order to top it.

“Gee thanks, Em, your enthusiasm is over _Waaatts!”_

Emerald barely caught a glimpse of the lab’s door swinging inward, and then Mercury had fired his greave into the windowsill and launched himself forward, catching her around the waist with one arm while he grabbed the chain with the other. They toppled backwards, and Emerald gasped as the feeling of stone underfoot vanished because in all the years she’d spent grappling over rooftops, she’d learned that the second you lost the thing under your foot, you were going to break bones.

The only thing keeping her from that dizzying plummet down through the winds and into the Pits was Mercury’s arm hooked around her back, drawing her tight to his chest.

But the empty air still yawned under her feet, and her heart was still thudding too loudly, and Mercury wouldn’t let go, would he? But what if he did? A scared, teeth-bared part of her refused to take the chance.

Instead of wrapping her arms around Mercury and clinging on for dear life, she reached for her weapon, drawing the other half of _Thief’s Respite_ with a twisting motion that loosened Mercury’s hold on her. Before the fear of falling could clench around her chest, she flicked the revolver into its falx configuration and sank the blade into a crack between the bricks like a climbing spike, giving herself a second anchor, one that couldn’t decide to let her go.

“Em!” Mercury’s grip on her waist faltered from the twisting she’d done, but as soon as his hand came free, it closed around her wrist. As they fell apart, her left leg looped around his right at the knee. They both came to a halt, then, feet dangling in space, _Thief’s Respite_ pulling them in opposite directions as they held each other in balance and out of sight of the window.

Mercury’s grip on her wrist was white-knuckled, just like it had been when he’d caught the punch she’d sent flying at his jaw last week. But the look on his face was new—grey eyes wide, brows drawn up in the middle.

He looked scared.

That look sank back into a more familiar scowl almost instantly. “Were you _trying_ to go cliff-diving?” he growled.

“I—” and now the thought of admitting she hadn’t trusted him made Emerald feel ashamed—“I panicked. I’m sorry.”

Cries of frustration resounded from the lab—Watts finding all his precious experiments in disarray, and Emerald started to smile until the winged Beringel came flapping around the corner of the keep, drawn in by the rage and loss.

“Well you sure picked a great time to—what are you looking at?” Mercury followed her petrified gaze to the monster bearing down on them.

“Of fucking course.” He rolled his eyes like that flying abomination was just an inconvenience, and it was such a purely _Mercury_ reaction that the icy fear in Emerald’s chest thawed a little.

“Emerald,” Mercury said, nodding at the falx that she had clenched in her hand, “you’re gonna need to fire that if we’re gonna—”

“I know,” she said, but her fear wouldn’t let her give up the only support she could control. She didn’t move.

“I’m not gonna drop you!” he snapped, and she flinched, fingers tightening around the handle of her falx even though she could hear the wingbeats now.

His voice softened, his head hanging low for a second. “I’m not.”

And she believed him.

With the Beringel five yards away and closing, Emerald wrenched _Thief’s Respite_ out of the bricks and fired a blade up at Mercury’s window, where it lodged in the mortar. Mercury’s hold on her wrist didn’t waver, even as the rest of her went weightless, and then she hit the retraction trigger and slammed into him as the chain wrenched her upwards at a steep angle.

Before she could give it even an instant’s thought, she’d wound an arm around Mercury’s back, holding him to her so that she wouldn’t lose him in the ascent. They shot through the open window and fell in an arc, Mercury twisting so that he took the brunt of the landing. She heard the air slam out of his lungs.

They rolled across the flagstones, their momentum propelling them forward until they hit the leg of Mercury’s bed. Emerald blinked hard and waited for the world to stop spinning, vaguely aware that she’d landed on her back, that she had solid ground beneath her again. She didn’t think, even for a second, of letting go of Mercury. He was sprawled on top of her, an arm wedged under the small of her back in a way that had to be uncomfortable. His mouth was close by her ear, still raking in the air he’d lost during the landing, and she felt every breath in her own chest.

Her falx lay on the floor just beneath the window, forgotten.

It took a minute for the thicket of grey hair that tickled her cheek and blurred her left eye’s vision to stir.

“You good?” Mercury asked, his voice low and a little hoarse as he slid his arm out from under her back and raised himself on his forearms.

And Emerald had some trouble answering because his face had never been so close to hers before, so close that his bangs brushed her forehead and she could see all the little pools of light in the grey of his eyes as they fixed on her own. And the breathless way he looked at her, like the answer to his question really mattered, and he was _so close,_ it would be easy to—

Yeah. Emerald didn’t trust her mouth not to do something she would regret later, so she just bit her lips and nodded.

“Good,” he whispered, and then he seemed to hit the same realization that Emerald had a second ago, because his mouth twisted awkwardly, and it was hard to be sure in the dim light, but she thought she saw a blush creeping up his face from his neck.

He rolled off of her, leaving her arms empty, and came up in a crouch a few feet away, trying to tease his hair back into place. Emerald snickered as she sat up.

“You’re like one of those tropical birds,” she said, searching for a jab that would bring things back to normal. “All worried about your feather-crest.”

And okay, that wasn’t up to her usual caliber of snark, but in her defense, her brains were still scrambled from vertigo and pretty-idiot-boy proximity.

“You’re just bitter that I’ve got the lead now,” he smirked, and their usual dynamic fell back into place, still intact. “I’d like to see you beat _that.”_

Emerald shook off the dizziness, got to her feet, and walked past him, collecting _Thief’s Respite_ from its place beside the window.

“Trust me,” she said, a plan blooming in her mind. “You will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finally, I just get to write these idiots flirting and wreaking havoc as god intended!
> 
> This work probably won't update for a few weeks because I've got a oneshot idea that I want to post before too much of V8 comes out and because the next few chapters of Loved by (Almost) No One after that will be lighter in tone, but when it returns, I promise continued snark, Emerald being an agent of chaos, Mercury having heart eyes about it, and some improbable Little Shop of Horrors references.
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading! :)


	4. Mean Green

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emerald's wreaking havoc, and Mercury is emotionally compromised about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back! I've missed writing this silliness so much! So much that this chapter spiraled out of control a little and ended up taking longer than intended, but here it is! It's ridiculous, and I had a lot of fun with it. :)
> 
> A couple notes: First, I know we're disappointed in Hazel right now, and understandably so, but one of my favorite jokes for this chapter hinged on him being a wholesome and disappointed father figure, so let's all just slide back into the big, comfortable clown shoes of our V6 dad!Hazel headcanons and partake in some miscommunication comedy, shall we?
> 
> Also, just a quick heads-up, there are some sex jokes this chapter, but they're pretty mild.

_Trust Emerald to stick me with the packing,_ Mercury thought, fiddling with the strap of one of the two full duffel bags he had slung over his shoulder. He had absolutely no contingency plan for what he’d do if Watts or Tyrian or even fucking Salem came waltzing around the corner and asked him what he was doing with two fully packed bags that contained every essential item that he and Emerald possessed between the two of them, from her fleece-lined sleeping bag to his leg maintenance kit.

“Yeah, nothing to worry about, Salem,” he muttered to himself, tiptoeing around the corner into an ancient, dust-ridden bedchamber, “me and Em are just taking a scenic little camping trip down to the Pits, I hear they’re extra bubbly this time of year.”

He seriously needed to win this dumb contest, if only to take away Emerald’s number-one pretext for ordering him around. Not only had she stuck him with the packing, but she had also, on her way out the door to set up whatever the hell her prank on Hazel was, tacked on, “ _Oh yeah and I might need a coat if you could grab me one and also if you could keep Tyrian out of his room for fifteen minutes I’d appreciate it.”_

Like. “No big deal, buddy, just find and obtain a new coat for me in the middle of the headquarters of the apocalypse cult we got suckered into, and also distract the most unhinged member of said apocalypse cult for reasons I’m not going to explain right now.”

He’d gotten lucky on the Tyrian front. The freak was busy helping Watts keep the fire in his lab from spreading to other rooms. Mercury let out a chuckle of pride at the thought. Emerald would have to pull out all the stops if the wanted to keep her crown.

Okay, thoughts like that were a sure way for him to jinx himself and get set on fire again.

Mercury padded over to the dilapidated wardrobe that stood against the wall. Even if getting a coat for Emerald was kind of a pain, it was a good idea. The portal would probably spit them out somewhere in Solitas, and even if they stuck to their plan and spun the bullhead around to fly towards Sanus, it would be winter when they landed. Emerald’s current “Cinder 2.0” fashion choices wouldn’t be kind to her.

Maybe he should nab her some boots, too.

He snorted. If her feet got cold, she’d probably try to convince him to carry her. Which he _would not_ do. Anyway, he’d have to carry both their packs on his back to do that, so there wouldn’t be any room for her, so it was out of the question. Unless he just picked her up in his arms. That would maybe be workable. Yeah. He could kind of fit her head between his chin and his shoulder, and if she put her arms around his neck, the strain on his arms wouldn’t be too much, and he’d be able to hear every laugh she tried to stifle whenever he cracked a joke, and she’d probably feel as soft and warm as she had when he’d woken up in her arms this morning, and if he tilted his head down a little, it would be easy to—

Shit.

He _really_ needed to nab Emerald some boots.

Mercury pulled open the creaking door of the ancient wardrobe and wrinkled his nose at the cobwebs that tore in half along the seam. The inside of the wardrobe was surprisingly un-dusty for something that probably hadn’t been cleaned out in decades, and it was filled, thank gods, with coats.

Mercury rifled through them—okay, that one had too many holes in it, that one had somehow developed mange, that one was _orange_ —until he found one that had… a sort of Emerald-iness to it, he guessed. It was kind of like the one Belladonna had rolled up in when the battle at Haven well and truly went to shit, but its collars and cuffs were a deep green.

He wondered which of Salem’s flunkies it had belonged to, how many decades ago she’d lived in this room. Had she been smart enough to run when she realized that every promise Salem made ended up broken? Had she left all her clothes behind and just booked it? Or had she left for a mission and died without leaving anybody behind who cared enough to look after her stuff? He reached out and trailed his fingers through the soft, woolly lining of it, then nodded and pulled it free of the wardrobe.

Whatever had happened to its last owner sure as hell wasn’t going to happen to its new one. Mercury would make sure of that.

He shoveled the coat into Emerald’s already impractically full bag—her definition of _essential_ seemed to be a lot broader than Mercury’s—and scooped up a pair of combat boots that looked about her size.

He made his way back down to Emerald’s empty room as quietly as he could while laden down with all their stuff, and he locked the door behind him and shoved their bags under her bed. What the hell was she doing that was taking so long?

He didn’t like sitting here doing nothing without knowing the answer to that question, but he didn’t have any way to go after her either, so he settled for pacing the room and running through his old training drills.

_Punch, punch, duckorhe’lldeckyou, spin-kick, bring it around, next leg, switch, retreatbeforetheknifecan—_

The window banged open, and Mercury spun, fists still raised, to see Emerald come barreling through it, grinning and disheveled with a messenger bag over her shoulder.

“Hoo!” she said, rolling out her shoulders as her feet hit the ground. “Now _that_ was a workout.” She blew away a strand of hair that sweat had stuck to her face. The messenger bag twitched and let out a faint growling noise. Emerald punched it, and it went still.

“What the hell did you _do?”_ Mercury asked.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She beamed, pulling one of her arms across her chest in a stretch. There was a giddy sort of glow rolling off of her that he hadn’t seen since Beacon fell.

He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

He smirked. “Well, while you were off being mysterious, _I_ was honing my skills as a personal shopper.”

“And with these new and powerful skills, you found…?”

And okay, taking the luggage out of its hiding place was a bad idea, but that eager little grin on Em’s face…

Besides, it would be good to make sure it fit her before their plan got too far underway.

“This,” he said, pulling Emerald’s bag out from under the bed and drawing the coat out of it. “Plus some boots, for winter.”

Mercury held the coat up by the shoulders so that Emerald could see the whole thing, and before he even had time to feel proud of the smile that crossed her face at the sight of it, she’d plunged forward, spinning her arms into the sleeves and filling them out under his hands before she turned around to face him and _why the hell were his hands still on the shoulders of the coat what the hell were they playing at._ He yanked them away.

But something about Emerald twirling between his arms felt familiar, and he stood there frozen with his hands floating between the two of them, trying to place it. Emerald was straightening out the coat’s collar.

“It looks good, right?” she was saying.

_There!_ The Vytal dance. At Beacon. The dress she’d spent hours agonizing over. The stupid bowtie that he’d kept getting all crooked until Em had slipped over to him and straightened it out. How when they’d been dancing—how had they ended up dancing? It wasn’t in the mission parameters—he’d raised his arm and let her twirl under it, slow and dignified with a little smirk on her face. When he’d raised it again, wondering if he could get that same smile to repeat itself, she’d spun through it faster, again and again and again until they’d both started giggling and she was wobbly and grinning and stumbling into his chest.

“I picked it out, of course it looks good,” he said before she could start looking at him funny, his mind still stuck on one of the only moments in his past that it was nice to be stuck on.

_Here’s to Cinder never having the chance to cut in again,_ he thought, and then he shoved it down. There wasn’t going to be any twirling in his future, not even if they got this right.

He’d just finished talking himself off of that alarmingly sappy train of thought when he tuned back into the material plane to see Emerald doing something even more alarming.

She was unbuckling the neck of her top. Mercury startled back a step and fell onto her bed.

“What are you doing?” Oh great, he loved hearing that note of slightly unhinged panic in his own voice.

“Oh, the coat’s great, but its collar kind of makes this one itch a little, so I was thinking maybe I could turn it under or…” she’d been talking absentmindedly, too focused on fiddling with her collar to actually look at him, but she did now. Mercury tried to school the petrified look off of his face, but he didn’t move fast enough, because Emerald froze up, too. Her eyes locked onto his, her hands hovering over her throat, her face flushing a little and what the fuck was happening to them both, it was just three square inches of Emerald’s neck, which he had seen many times, so why were they both—

A heavy knock sounded at the door, and they both jumped, Emerald shrugging out of the coat and shoving it into Mercury’s hands.

“Hazel,” she whispered.

Mercury shoved the coat into the duffel bag and kicked it under the bed.

“Emerald.” Hazel’s deep voice rang through the door. “The weeding.”

“Just a sec!” Emerald called out, and damnit, that hitch in her voice was definitely suspicious. She nudged Mercury’s shin with her toe and nodded under the bed. Understanding, he dropped to the floor and rolled beneath it, steadfastly not thinking about the fact that this was the kind of place where under-bed monsters might actually be a thing.

He saw Emerald’s heels hurry to the door, saw it swing inward.

“Okay, let’s go!” she said hastily, and her feet made a little shuffle towards the door only for a larger pair of boots to advance past them into the room. Mercury swallowed.

“I think you may have made off with my gloves again,” said Hazel. “I can’t find them anywh—”

Hazel stopped talking, then, because he’d stooped down to look under the bed.

“Hi,” said Mercury, waving faintly. Wow. Smooth. Absolutely the kind of behavior worthy of a paid assassin. His mind raced to scrape up an even vaguely plausible explanation for what he was doing down here.

He looked up at the wooden joists of the bed and made a show of checking their sturdiness with his hands.

“Well, Em,” he said loudly. “It’s all fixed. You shouldn’t have any more of that creaking.”

“Oh, great,” said Emerald, playing along. Her face appeared alongside Hazel’s, wearing a slightly strained smiled. “It was really driving me crazy.” Her hand stretched out toward Mercury, forcing Hazel out of the way before he could see the packed bags behind Mercury.

Mercury let her pull him to his feet, then squared his shoulders, staring down Hazel, trying to position himself, just a little bit, between Emerald and the big guy. Their cover was flimsy, and Mercury knew it. Hazel probably knew it too, from the way his eyes were narrowing as he looked back and forth between them. Emerald was still buckling the collar of her shirt back into place, her eyes downcast and guilty-looking in a way that was definitely not helping. Mercury balled his hands into fists. He’d sweep in a kick to the shins first, try to knock Hazel off his center of gravity long enough for Emerald to make a break for it, and then…

Then they’d be screwed.

Hazel sighed, his shoulders slumping. He shook his head. “I knew this would happen eventually.”

“You—you did?” Emerald looked up in confusion. Mercury stayed tense, ready to spring.

He knew too well that it didn’t pay to leave his guard down around big guys with hair-trigger tempers.

“It was only a matter of time,” he said. “And I understand why you would both—this is a hostile place, and it can be easy to feel alone here. But I wish that you had been more patient.”

Mercury got ready to kick, because that was the kind of line that Marcus had always turned on, the gentle reprimand that turned suddenly into a right hook to the jaw.

“We’ve been caged up in here for months,” Mercury said, letting an edge creep into his voice, attacking with words so that he wouldn’t lose control and attack with his greaves. He slid forward half a step, planting himself more firmly between Emerald and Hazel. “What did you expect?”

Hazel looked stern. “A few months feels like a long time to you because you’re both very young, but that’s all the more reason why you should be careful before taking actions that can have permanent consequences.”

“We know,” said Emerald, stepping forward so that she was side by side with Mercury, and he wanted to hiss at her to _back up_ , couldn’t she see that this was going south fast? If Hazel took her down first instead of Mercury, they’d _both_ be trapped, because the only thing Mercury had learned from Haven, other than that getting headbutted by a toddler really put a dent in the old self-esteem, was that he apparently wasn’t capable of leaving Emerald behind.

“But Merc and I, we’ve really talked this out,” Emerald said, her most earnest sweet-talking-a-mark look in place. “And we’ve decided it’s what we want.”

Her right hand caught Mercury’s left, and he startled, staring at her. Hazel was about to kill them—what was she playing at? Some bullshit show of solidarity wasn’t going to talk him down from caving their heads in.

The most infuriating thing was that the second Emerald’s fingers wrapped around his, they softened and uncurled out of a fist and tangled with hers. Godsdamn traitors.

Okay. Apparently forces beyond Mercury’s control had settled on Team Bullshit Show of Solidarity.

He kept his right hand balled up, ready to punch, as Hazel’s eyes slid from Emerald’s face, to his own, and back again.

Hazel took a step back, his shoulders slumping in something like disappointment. He gripped the bridge of his nose and said, “Just promise me you’re using birth control. Watts is not a licensed obstetrician.”

Mercury’s brain came entirely untethered from his present plane of existence. He could see and hear the things happening around him, but he was as incapable of processing or acting on them as a tree struck by lightning.

He heard Emerald say, in a nervous rush, “Oh my gods, of course we are,” and he stared, motionless, into the middle distance.

He saw Hazel nod with a look of relief, and he heard Emerald telling Hazel where she’d left his gloves, and he stared, motionless, into the middle distance.

He was just starting to shake himself out of his trance enough to feel embarrassment and horror when something even more unthinkable happened.

Emerald leaned up, whispered, “Sorry,” in Mercury’s ear, and then pressed a light kiss to his jaw, reducing him, again, to a thunderstruck tree.

With an awkward clearing of his throat, Hazel made himself scarce. Emerald squeezed Mercury’s hand once and then followed him. Mercury revolved slowly on the spot, watching her go. The anxious smile she cast over her shoulder brought him back closer to earth.

And then she knocked him straight out of orbit again by calling out, “I’ll be back soon, babe!”

Mercury keeled over backwards onto the bed the second the door fell shut, and a tired laugh worked its way out of his chest.

_At least we have an alibi for where we were when Watts’s lab burned down._ Okay. Good work, brain. That was a solid, professional thought to have about this situation. Let’s just keep up this energy, and I’m sure everything will _oh gods he thought Em and I did_ things _in this bed._

Mercury scrambled off of the bed and toppled to the floor, landing in a way that made his right prosthetic let out a creak of disapproval.

Well, he was glad no one was around to see that.

There was no reason for him to be so off-kilter about this. Hazel had made an embarrassing, but plausible, assumption, based on the information he had. Emerald had flawlessly played on that assumption to distract him from any other possibilities while Mercury was busy falling back into useless old training habits. It meant nothing except that Emerald was smart and good at what she’d been hired for, which Mercury already knew.

Except nobody had ever kissed him before. Except his fingers kept straying up to that place on his jaw like they expected it to be made of something different than the rest of him. It had happened so quickly that his stupid brain had barely recorded what it felt like, but—but he was pretty sure it had felt soft. That it had felt like something he wouldn’t mind feeling again.

Mercury shook his head.

For as much as he bagged on Emerald for getting unprofessional when her emotions ran away with her (see: that time she tried to shoot Tyrian in the face, which had, okay, maybe filled him with about two seconds of intense terror and admiration before it became clear she was in over her head), he sure was getting sappy.

He pressed down on the weird, fluttering feeling under his ribs until it went still and then climbed out the window.

Emerald had said that the best vantage point for her prank would be from the roof of the Keep overlooking Hazel’s garden, so Mercury clambered up over the steeply sloping shingles and balanced his way along the peak of the roofline until he came to the flat stone balcony that jutted out over Hazel’s plot.

Mercury settled down with his forearms resting on the railing, and waited. On the slope of the roof beside him was a rusty-smelling fifty-gallon barrel of… something, secured in place with a familiar green chain. It must have taken a hell of a lot of work for Emerald to lug it up here—she really hadn’t been kidding about the workout.

Knowing Emerald, he scooted a few feet further away from it, just in case it was rigged to explode or something.

In the garden below, Hazel and Emerald were moving slowly through the ranks of plants, bending down and rooting out weeds every so often. They did this every other day, watering and weeding and trimming and making things grow, even out here in the always-darkness. Mercury had never joined them, not even when Emerald asked him to. He couldn’t imagine spending that much time with his eyes on the ground and his back to the world, turning a blind, trusting eye on his surroundings.

He thought, though, as he watched the little green speck that was Emerald kneel in front of a sprout and root out the invaders threatening to smother it, that he could see why she liked it. City kid that she was, she’d probably only ever eaten packaged things she could steal off of shelves and never been able to control when they came or went.

When they’d first been on the road with Cinder, while her hair was still long and he was still walking shakily on his shiny new legs, there’d been a day when they’d missed a couple meals. Mercury hadn’t said anything about it, and after the slap Cinder had given her the day before, Emerald hadn’t either, but she’d made this face, her eyes wide and sharp like she’d been wounded. She’d looked away whenever Cinder glanced back at her, but Mercury saw it, probably because he wasn’t important enough for her to hide it from him.

And after a few hours, Mercury had been as sick of seeing that look as Emerald probably was of making it, so he’d yanked a pear off a tree as he passed it and tossed it to her.

He hadn’t thought much of it at the time. But she’d glared at him less after that. She’d started calling him “Merc” two days later.

So it figured that she’d be obsessed with food that came out of the ground. He wondered if she’d keep gardening after this, when they landed… wherever they landed. He bit down on that thought before it could get too far, because imagining Emerald sitting somewhere green with a smile on her face in front of a house that was also his house—that kind of thinking wouldn’t pay.

Even if they made it out of here alive, Mercury wasn’t stupid enough to think that peace was in the cards for either of them.

Emerald pulled something out of her messenger bag while Hazel’s back was turned and dropped it into a row of cabbages. Then, and Mercury had to squint to make this out, she raised her hand to her face and, in a flash of teeth, bit open her palm at the base of her thumb.

Mercury recoiled, his eyes going wide. What the _fuck?_

Emerald flicked the blood onto coiling black something that she’d taken out of her messenger bag, then pointed at it and shrieked while holding the bloodied hand behind her back. The something grew larger.

Hazel let out an exclamation and waved her away from the black thing, which was now greedily expanding over the cabbages beside it.

A blade of _Thief’s Respite_ lodged itself in the railing beside Mercury’s arm, and then Emerald came racing up to land beside him.

Mercury decided to voice his earlier question aloud. “What the _fuck?”_

“I’m gonna need you to be more specific,” said Emerald, crossing over to that weirdly ominous barrel.

Mercury settled for, “What did you have in that bag?”  
  
Emerald shrugged, visibly holding back a smile. “Just a little garden pest.”

_“Em.”_

“It’s an Audrey Segunda.”

“A what?”

Emerald spoke like she was reciting a textbook from memory, which, to be fair, she probably was. “A rare floral Grimm found primarily in central Anima, it is largely harmless when left unfed but can rapidly grow to city-threatening sizes when brought into contact with human blood.” Dropping the textbook voice, she added. “There’s a patch in the shade by the far corner of the Keep. We have to weed them out a lot.”

“So you bit your hand open to mildly inconvenience Hazel’s cabbage crop,” said Mercury, crossing his arms. “I gotta say, Em, I’m not that impressed.”

Emerald smirked, aura already flickering over her cut and closing it. “I bit my hand open to buy myself time.” She crossed over to the barrel, which Mercury now had a distinctly bad feeling about. Her hand stilled as she reached for the chain. She looked down at the angry, growling speck of Hazel throwing punches at the Audrey Segunda.

“I… I don’t know if I should do this,” she said, her hand closing around the chain.

Mercury ignored whatever can of worms _that_ was in favor of a more pressing question. “Emerald… is that oil drum full of human blood? And if so, where did you get it?”

Emerald shrugged it off. “I just kinda took it on faith that it was the kind of thing Tyrian would have in his room, and he didn’t disappoint.”

“Gods, I’m glad we never have to find out why.”

“Yeah,” Emerald’s eyes were downcast again.

Damnit, she was going to need encouragement. Mercury sucked at encouragement. “You know, Em, we only get out of here if you drop that barrel.”

“Maybe he’d let us go,” said Emerald. “The whole time we were out there, he was muttering to himself about whether he’d failed to do enough to bolster my self-esteem.” Her eyes flicked to Mercury, and her mouth twitched up in a nervous smile. He rubbed the back of his neck, feeling his face go pink again.

Mercury closed his eyes. He couldn’t let his own unprofessionalism and Emerald’s weird parental issues foil their escape. He pressed his mouth into a line.

“Em, I don’t think he’d be singing that same tune if we weren’t on his side.”

“Maybe…”

“Look, am I the only one who remembers him trying to fry that one girl’s head at Haven? Or how close he came to crushing that kid’s skull? I do not want to flip a coin and find out whether or not we land on Hazel’s skull-crushing list, okay?”

“I guess.” Emerald was still biting her lip, uncertain.

Mercury heaved a sigh and brought out the heavy artillery. “Em, he thinks we boinked, he _has_ to die.”

Emerald’s mouth pressed into a solemn line. She nodded once and, with a single ruthless tug, pulled the chain free, letting the barrel start its rumbling, inexorable roll down the roof.

Turning her back on the chaos she was setting in motion, Emerald rounded on Mercury. “ _‘Boinked?’_ _That’s_ your euphemism of choice?”

“I don’t think you’re really in a position to judge, _babe,”_ he fired back, enjoying the flustered look it put on her face.

Before Emerald could reply, the barrel hit the ground with a _crash_. Mercury rushed over to the railing with Emerald by his side just in time to see the barrel explode into a few twisted scraps of metal and a rush of red so dark it was almost black that flowed past Hazel’s feet and soaked into the soil around the Audrey Segunda, which was already blooming darkly, tendrils unfolding and stretching out. In seconds, it was as tall as Hazel was, and there was still a _lot_ of blood left.

_Note to self: Never underestimate how batshit Emerald is willing to go._

“Mother of _gods,_ Em.”  
  
Emerald shrugged. “Go big or go home.” She winced as a black vine lashed out and cleaved through a line of garden plants. “There go Hazel’s prize radishes.”

“Prize? Who the hell does he have for competition?”

“Watts tries to engineer some in his lab every year,” Emerald said, “but Hazel always wins because they turn out venomous. He’s very proud.”

“Well, Watts might pull out a win, this year,” said Mercury with a smirk as the Audrey Segunda let out a strange, warbling cry that shook the earth and Hazel threw fire-laced punches at it.

“Not with the state you left his lab in.” Emerald was smirking too, with a proud little gleam in her eye that made Mercury feel weirdly bold.

“So you admit my prank was good.” He leaned back against the railing and crossed his arms but not before checking over his shoulder to make sure he wouldn’t fall, because he’d learned his lesson.

“It had its strong points,” said Emerald, “but mine’s better.” As if in support of her case, the Audrey Segunda let out an echoing, strangely tuneful roar.

And Mercury suddenly knew just how to attack, how to stop feeling like the weird, mushy one, when that was clearly Emerald’s job.

“It’s pretty good,” he admitted as the carnage below them shook the floor of the balcony. “And maybe you can pick up some bonus points for your quick thinking with Hazel back there.” It was a light strike, one that would be easy to pull back, but Emerald’s reaction would tell him a lot.

“Oh, shut up!” Wow. He hadn’t expected to successfully strike a nerve that quickly. That usually meant he was onto something. And if he was onto what he thought he was onto…

That wasn’t something he could afford to think about. But he wanted to _know._

Emerald took a step toward him, her eyes narrowing. “I did what I had to do to get us out of that in one piece, and you were _not_ helpful.”

“Mmhm,” said Mercury smugly, because once Emerald was on a tear like this, the amount of encouragement it took to keep her going was hilariously minimal.

“I committed a terrible and necessary act to further our common goal, and you are going to wipe that smirk off your face,” she said.

Mercury kept the smirk right where it was and played his ace. “Right, Em. You kissed me _for the plot.”_

“Urgh! You are the _worst!_ ” Emerald flung her hands in the air and spun around, stomping off across the rooftop, and Mercury found himself thinking, without really meaning to, of their first day in Vale, of saying, “You want me,” as Emerald turned her back on him, perfectly secure in his certainty that it wasn’t true.

Without really meaning to, he touched his jaw again, staring after Emerald as she stormed away, and a hairline fracture ran across that certainty.

Below Mercury’s feet, an eight-foot-tall guy with flames shooting from the Dust crystals in his arms was lobbing punch after punch into a thirty-foot-tall murder plant that had gorged itself on human blood, and the strangest thing in his world was the fact that Emerald Sustrai might actually want him.

“C’mon, asshole!” Emerald’s voice broke his thoughts. “Tyrian isn’t gonna prank himself, and _I’ve_ got the lead now.”

Mercury smiled. At least some things stayed the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tune in next... uh, probably month because I'm saving these chapters up to provide a buffer between Arcs Three and Four of Loved by (Almost) No One... for Mercury's final prank on Tyrian!
> 
> Also, new fic ideas kept ambushing me while I was writing this chapter, some of them actually partially sneaking their way into it, and yes this is my way of saying that I have no choice but to write a two-shot of these idiots being awkward about their V2 dance infiltration. I don't know when it's going to happen, but it is HAPPENING.
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think of the latest chaos :D


	5. Risks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Emerald struggles to trust herself while Mercury aims for payback.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi there! It's been a while! You can tell because little bits of angst keep slipping into what really should be the most Looney Tunes chapter of them all because I'm out of practice at comedy. Still, to everyone who's come here from Loved by (Almost) No One, isn't it nice to be in this timeline where Nothing. Bad. Ever. Happens. EVERRRRRRRR. I know it is for me :D

Emerald really shouldn’t have kissed Mercury.

It had been a tactical call made under duress, a calculated risk.

Emerald didn’t know why, lacking any formal education whatsoever, she had assumed that she would be good at math. And now she was paying for it.

She had just done what had to be done to keep Hazel from unraveling their whole plan, and Mercury had been about as useful and cooperative as a wooden post, so it wasn’t like he had had a better idea kicking around.

And yet!

Here he was acting like _she_ was the unprofessional one.

Smirking and taunting and calling her _babe_ to get a rise out of her. She resented how much it was working.

It wasn’t like he was making it out to be. It wasn’t like she’d _wanted_ to kiss him. It was just another illusion, the kind she spun every day, only a little more… tangible.

_Wait. Shit! I could’ve just made Hazel_ see _me kiss him!_ _Or vanished the bags with my Semblance. Or vanished Mercury with my Semblance before Hazel could see him._

_Or done literally anything besides_ kiss Mercury fucking Black.

Emerald let out an exasperated huff as she went stomping across the roof of the Keep. She hoped that Mercury, a few paces behind her, wouldn’t be able to hear it. The last thing that smirky idiot needed was more of a sign that he’d gotten under her skin.

She shot a blade of _Thief’s Respite_ up into the windowsill of the library turret and grappled herself up through the window, smiling a little as Mercury let out an indignant, “Hey, wait up!”

He wasn’t the only one who could be annoying and aloof.

Though gods, he was _so_ annoying.

Why the hell had she kissed him? She wished her brain would stop circling around the question, but it just kept looping and looping, like water being sucked down a drain.

It had been a moment of stress.

She’d already been kind of muddle-headed when Hazel appeared. Oh gods, it didn’t bode well that the cause of the muddle-headedness was Mercury’s hands lingering on her shoulders for a second more than they strictly needed to and his face flushing a soft pink as he looked up at her from the bed.

Okay, okay, that was troubling, but the actual kiss had been an act, pure and simple.

It wasn’t like she’d noticed the way Mercury stationed himself between her and Hazel and felt an instant buzz of fear and of something stronger and warmer than fear in her chest, not like that feeling of warmth had drowned out the fear entirely when Mercury’s hand had softened and then curled itself tightly around hers, not like that had made her feel suddenly bold, like she could let free something she had been holding back, not like it had felt as easy as falling into the pull of gravity to stand up on tiptoe and close the distance between them and aim for that sharp angle in his jawline that she’d never been able to help noticing, not—

Oh no.

It might have been kind of like that.

Mercury came sailing through the window, landed on his hands, and rolled up to his full height with a completely careless grace that was absolutely unfair. His hair was askew, and Emerald crossed her arms and balled her hands into fists to fight down the urge to tease it back into place.

“Well,” she said as, from the far side of the Keep, the Audrey Segunda let out a guttural roar. “Good luck taking my crown now.” She couldn’t help smiling. Her prank had been brilliant, and she knew it. She’d done _research._ And _prep work._ There was no way Mercury could catch up.

She hoped.

Mercury smirked, wandering along the perimeter of the room and scanning over the shelves with his eyes. “‘S that so?”

“I’ve got a decade of heists under my belt,” she said, sitting down at the ancient, dust-coated round table in the center of the room and flipping the ancient, gold-spined book she’d been reading from for the past month. It claimed to contain a thousand and one different stories, and given that it weighed as much as a cinder block, she was inclined to take it at face value. “The skills transfer.”

The smirk didn’t leave, and that made Emerald uneasy. She trained her eyes on the book, assuming what she hoped was a look of calm, unflappable concentration. She wasn’t going to let Mercury get to her again today. If he knew how she felt—

_I don’t feel like that, so it doesn’t matter._

Right. Right. If he _thought_ she felt like that, he’d only pull away and make fun of her. If Cinder had taught Emerald anything, it was that she couldn’t trust what she felt. That she could take the scantiest thread of hope and weave it into certainty—that she was safe, and cared for, and loved. And that certainty would _hurt_ her if she gave it the chance.

So even if Mercury had held her in his sleep, even if he’d stood up to Tyrian for her, even if he’d gotten her snow boots without her even having to ask, she couldn’t trust it. She couldn’t trust herself to know that it was real, that it wasn’t just her stupid, desperate brain trying to deny the truth: that nobody loved her, and maybe nobody ever would.

So she kept her eyes on her book, and she pressed whatever unholy impulse had made her kiss him back down. Or, at least, she tried to.

“So, you spend a lot of time up here, huh?” Mercury said, completing his circuit of the room.

“Yes,” Emerald said, not looking up, “I do.”  
  
A little chuckle. “I always knew you were a nerd.”

“Mmhm.” Emerald wasn’t going to rise to the bait. He was too good at drawing her in. She leaned down further, squinting at the ancient, curling script and letting it take up her whole field of vision.

“Well then,” Mercury went on, clearly trying for another angle of attack. “Since you’re so brilliant, maybe you could give a poor, hapless assassin a hand.”

Emerald didn’t look up from her book, but she couldn’t keep back a reply this time. “And why would I help someone who wants to usurp my crown?”  
  
“‘Cause it’ll be fun to watch Tyrian eat shit,” Mercury said, his voice sounding closer now, and Emerald had to admit, that was a pretty compelling motivation.

“I have a condition,” Emerald said, spying an opportunity to turn this situation to her advantage.

“Which is?”  
  
“You do not make any reference, _whatsoever,_ to the necessary _but horrible_ deception that I was forced to use to keep Hazel from splattering us.”

And then she startled back with an embarrassingly high-pitched sound of alarm as Mercury thunked his head down in the middle of her book, planting a lopsided, upside-down grin right in front of her face. Gods, he must have actively climbed up into the middle of the table while she was focusing on her book to set himself up to pull this stupid stunt. To throw her off balance with that smile.

“Sure thing, babe,” he said, and the method for shutting him up that immediately occurred to Emerald was… not what it should have been. She scooted her chair back another few inches and scowled.

“Did I not _just_ ask you to shut up about that?”

“You haven’t held up your end of the bargain yet,” Mercury said, shrugging, which looked a little strange with him flat on his back like this. “Don’t see why I have to hold up mine. _Babe.”_

The smirk had become an actual shit-eating grin now, and Emerald had to fight down an urge to laugh, even under the swell of indignation because, well—it’d been a while since Mercury had seemed happy enough to be this obnoxious. Out here in the darkness, he just scowled and growled and stared straight ahead, so when he smiled—it seemed, just a little, like they were back in a lighter world.

“Fine then,” said Emerald. “How do I hold up my half?”

“Well, this is where Salem keeps all her books, right?” Mercury asked. “Care to give me the rundown?”  
  
“Yeah,” said Emerald. “Novels, epics, a few scientific treatises from Watts, some creepy old personal papers, and all Hazel’s gardening manuals.”  
  
“And you know exactly where everything is, right?”  
  
With a little stirring of pride, Emerald said, “Yes.”

“You can find me any book in here that I want then?”  
  
“Bet on it.”  
  
The grin grew. “Oh Em. Dear, sweet, naïve, innocent Em.”

Emerald scowled.   
  
“I’d like the girlhood diary of the eldritch god who employs us. Please.”

Emerald rolled her eyes. “Coming right up.”

It took Emerald only two minutes and about four times that many shudders of disgust to gather the materials Mercury would need, and once she’d laid them out in front of him—he’d finally sat down at the table like an actual civilized human being instead of lying on it—she pulled up a chair beside him, ready to read aloud through whatever parts he needed to look at.

Within about a week of their arrival at Haven as students, all Mercury’s non-combat grades had started to tank badly enough that even with Lionheart pulling the strings to keep him enrolled, it was drawing a lot of attention from their professors. Attention they couldn’t afford.

Emerald had been so caught up in the glow of new books and clean clothes and three meals a day that she’d barely noticed anything was wrong until Cinder had cornered Mercury against the wall of their room while Emerald was trying to study and told him, in her very calmest voice, the one that made Emerald shrink away even when she wanted to be loyal, to pull his act together before it cost him.

And well, Emerald hadn’t wanted to see Cinder that angry again, even if Mercury was kind of a pain in the ass, so when he’d dragged his chair over beside her and muttered, not looking at her, “I have to hear it. My eyes don’t—or my brain, I dunno, I just. The letters scramble. I have to hear it.”

It was the first time he’d ever asked her for help, and even with how hard she’d been trying to hate him for splitting Cinder’s attention, for making her feel like she might lose the closest thing to a family she’d ever had—

She’d wanted to help him. She didn’t want to see him go stiff and clench his hands into fists because Cinder was disappointed with him. Whenever Cinder had been that disappointed with _her_ , Emerald had always ended up crying—later, locked in a bathroom stall somewhere, where Cinder couldn’t see the tears and call them weakness.

So they’d spent the rest of the term sharing a single desk in their room, comparing equations and scratching out formulas, and sometimes, when they got carried away, laughing at the tangled romantic histories of ancient monarchs.

Emerald’s throat got sore, sometimes, from all the reading, but Mercury found a blend of tea in the student café that helped, and every night that they had a monstrous haul of reading from their classes, a cup of it would appear at her elbow, like clockwork.

As Emerald dropped herself into the chair next to Mercury, she found herself smiling a little.

“Which section?” Emerald asked. “I don’t know if it’ll do much good. The dialect’s so old I can’t really make any sense of—”

“Oh,” Mercury said, and the sharp, smug look he’d been wearing since he’d vaulted through the window had softened a little. “I, uh, actually just need to see what it looks like, so I… don’t need you to read it.” He sounded almost disappointed.

He shrugged, his mouth quirking up at the corner a little. “Eh, it’s for the best. We don’t have the right kind of tea here.”

And Emerald found a matching smile springing to life on her face, knowing that their thoughts had traveled the same path, that what had mattered to her also mattered to him and—

_You’re spinning a lot out of nothing again, Sustrai._

As Mercury reached out for a sheet of paper and a crappy old pen that had been lying in the middle of the desk for gods knew how long, Emerald pressed her mouth back into a line.

When he smoothed the sheet out on the table, though, and aligned Salem’s old diary with it carefully, she found herself leaning closer, trying to figure out what he was doing, why he had that intent look on his face.

“Okay,” he said. “This cursive is garbage, so I might need you to get me to individual letters, yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Emerald, leaning forward over the diary. “Of course.”

And Mercury barely ever asked for anything, and when he did he never said it as a question, but Emerald thought it was maybe a little troubling that _Of course_ was her first thought whenever he did.

“All right, Em,” he said. “Track me down an ‘M’ and a ‘Y.’” She did, and Mercury squinted at them both in isolation for a second before, in a quick gesture, jotting down the word _My._ In Salem’s exact handwriting.

“Since when can you do that?” she asked, staring in amazement and leaning in so that her arm brushed his as she tried to puzzle out any differences between the two copies of the word.

Mercury shrugged, and she felt it against her shoulder. He was drumming the pen against the knuckles of his other hand in a way that was almost nervous. “I think since I was eight? Somewhere in there.”

Emerald frowned. High-class forgery didn’t really seem like something she’d expect anyone to learn in that isolated, liquor-scented cabin up in the mountains. “Huh. But why would—?”  
  
Another shrug, and this time Emerald got the feeling that he was trying to shrug something _off._ “Well, you know, sometimes you need a letter or something to lure a target out into the open, and with the drinking, the old man’s fine motor skills got wonky, so I’d do it, and I’d get it right or—” he bit his lip. Emerald’s hand stretched out toward his where it had curled into a fist on the table only to falter halfway.

“The skills transfer.” He said, with a quiet, hollow laugh. His eyes were far away for a second, and then he shook himself, the spark in them coming back. “So, uh, you think I should dot the ‘I’s with hearts, or is that overkill?”

And the smile he cast her way was brittle and nervous, and it made her hand rise up and settle on his shoulder, made something in her chest go soft. She didn’t know how to do this, exactly. She just knew that Mercury’s hand, on her shoulder like this, had made her feel solid, even with Tyrian’s eyes staring into her face. She hoped that hers could do the same thing for him, smoothing her fingers over the fleecy fabric of his jacket, trying to coax the tension out of the rigid muscle beneath it.

_“It’s no big deal. ‘M used to it.”_

_“Yeah, but—the things you’re used to kind of suck, and I don’t—I’d like to be different.”_

Emerald still wanted to be different for him. Even—even if he couldn’t be different for her. She wanted to be someone who wouldn’t hurt him when he was brittle, who wouldn’t make him feel stared-through and weak.

Gods, he was right. She was such a sap.

But his shoulder was starting to loosen, to relax back into her hand the same way it did when she helped him out of his armor. He sank, after a moment, into a familiar sigh, then shrugged her hand off. Emerald pulled it back in quickly, a flicker of anxiety slipping in.

“Sorry,” she whispered.

“No, it’s—” Mercury halted himself, shook his head. “Let’s get some more letters.”

In the end, Emerald couldn’t actually stand to look at Mercury’s finished forgery for more than two seconds at a time without feeling like her eyes were going to burn out of her skull—he’d opted for the “I”s dotted with hearts—but it looked like it would do the trick.

“You know, it would be more believable from Watts,” she pointed out.  
  
“Emerald,” Mercury said. “Look me in the eye and tell me Watts would voluntarily go outside for anything other than specimen collection.”

She couldn’t.

So Mercury ran off to plant his vomitously implication-laden invitation to a Crucial and Not-to-Be-Missed and Not-at-All-Suspicious Rendezvous at the Pits in Tyrian’s room, and Emerald was left to shoulder their luggage out of her room and grapple out the window with it in the harsh Evernight winds, the weight making her lurch awkwardly on her way to the ground.

She staggered when she landed, nearly rolling her ankle and cursing as the packs made her overbalance.

“Hmph.” She blew a loc of hair out of her face and set her jaw. Sure, it was a lot to carry, but it would be worth it to have a seasonally appropriate sleeping bag and _actual shampoo_ and backup food reserves and _no,_ I will not be sharing your gods-awful six-in-one body wash with you, I’m a criminal, not a _barbarian, **Mercury.**_

Emerald shrugged off her annoyance and drew half of _Thief’s Respite,_ keeping it extended in front of her as she crept along the outer walls, her eyes alert for signs of danger. Out here beyond the walls, anything could be lying in wait for a weighed-down, unsuspecting human to stagger by. Even in the warmth of her new coat, she shivered.

The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she whirled with a shriek of alarm as something prodded the spot between her shoulder blades.

Only to see Mercury smirking at the end of the barrel.

Emerald growled. “I will _end_ you.”

Mercury just kept grinning. “Sure, Em. That gets more convincing every time you say it.”

Emerald rolled her eyes, conceding defeat. “Did you at least plant your letter?”  
  
“Yep!” Mercury clapped his hands together. “Threw in a couple more surprises, too. C’mon, lemme show you the best spot to watch from.”

He hurried off down the rocky embankment that sloped down from the castle, and Emerald followed him, missing a step every so often and stumbling under the weight of their luggage.

“You still happy you’ve got your face wash, Sustrai?”

_Not all of us can dunk our faces in cold water every morning and emerge with miraculously perfect skin, dumbass._

Emerald figured saying that aloud would give him more ammo than it was worth, so she just said, “I am!” with as much dignity as she could muster while trying to vault down a boulder after him. She stumbled as she landed, but Mercury’s hand closed around her arm and stayed there until she found her footing.

“Besides,” she said, “you’re gonna have to carry it all anyway when I win.”

“We’ll see about that.” Mercury smiled and started nimbly cutting a path through the rocks again, like he’d made this trip a lot of times before.

“How do you know this part of the Evernight so well, anyway?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, “while _you_ were up in the library being a nerd after Beacon, _I_ took up hiking.”

It took Emerald all of two seconds to decipher what that actually meant and spring a counterattack. “You mean you took up brooding dramatically on the cliffs?”

“And kicking stuff when Watts pissed me off, yeah.” Mercury said breezily. “Pretty much.”

Emerald caught herself smiling for a second before a worry nagged at her. “You really shouldn’t have gone out here alone.”

“Not like anybody was gonna come with me,” Mercury said. “‘Hey, Hazel, you wanna explore the hellscape for laughs?’”  
  
 _Hazel actually would have been a great tour guide._ Emerald tabled that though, because—

“I would’ve…” But her voice trailed off, and Mercury stopped in his tracks, glancing over his shoulder at her.

He said what they’d both just realized. “No you wouldn’t.”

Not while Cinder was there. Not while Emerald felt tied to her side, like stepping away from her would be a betrayal so vast that she would _deserve_ to be tossed back into the streets like the rat she was, and oh gods, Cinder had been a monster, but _Mercury_ had needed her, and she hadn’t seen it, hadn’t paid enough attention, and this was exactly the kind of thing that would always earn her a strike across the face because she was never enough, never ever enough, that was what Cinder said, that was what she knew was true, and she deserved the hit that was coming and—

Mercury turned and settled his hands on her shoulders, lightly, like he was scared she’d spook. And okay, she did spook a little, habit making her flinch even though he’d never given her a reason to. She could feel the weird grimace her face was set in, and it was strange to ease out of it without a slap making her ears ring before she got the chance.

“Hey,” he said, and his eyes and his voice were as soft as they’d been when she’d first woken up this morning. “Don’t wander off on me, ‘kay?”

And the sheer relief of not being slapped and berated, of being touched gently even though she’d screwed up, made her want to cry because when the hell had she gotten so, so used to being slapped and berated?

It took every shred of self-discipline she had not to fall straight into his arms and cling to him and have a cry that she was pretty sure was long overdue.

But now wasn’t the time.

And Mercury hated being touched anyway, so Emerald just inhaled sharply and nodded, squaring her shoulders so he felt free to move his hands. “I won’t.”

“Good,” Mercury said, smoothing his hands down her arms before suddenly inching them away when they reached her own. “That bitch isn’t worth it.”

“Thanks,” Emerald said faintly, half-expecting Cinder to fry him on the spot for blasphemy from a world away. “I—I’ll keep that in mind.”

As he turned away again and said, “C’mon, we’re nearly there,” Emerald wondered how he did it. Cinder had only had two years to do a number on Emerald—to rewrite the voice that talked in her head, to teach her to cringe and cower and hate herself. Marcus Black had had seventeen.

Emerald watched Mercury moving ahead of her, the relaxed gait that she’d watched him learn from scratch on new legs, the purpling glow of the Evernight sky on his hair, and wondered how he was even standing there walking, let alone cracking jokes and talking back and grounding her when she was scared.

Maybe one day she’d work up the nerve to ask him—if they had “one day”s to look forward to, which she doubted.

For now, it was enough to know that he was here, somehow, after everything, and that if he still was, she could be too.

“All right,” Mercury said, drawing to a halt and spinning in place as he spread out his arms. “Voila!”

He’d stopped on a rocky outcropping that looked out over a vast, flat plain of Pits that bubbled and roiled with Grimm. The jagged stone jutting up along the edge of the ledge could easily screen her from the sight of anyone on the ground. Winding down to the left, though, was a narrow track that threaded its way to a low overhang with a vast round hole in the ceiling and walls that stretched so far forward that it nearly qualified as a cave.

Mercury was staring at it like a proud father at a newborn child. “It’s the best ambush point I’ve ever seen.” He pointed, and Emerald became suddenly aware of a tottering pile of boulders perched precariously above that hole in the ceiling, ready to block off any escape that didn’t lead straight out into the Pits.

“Thanks for giving me a chance to use it,” he said. “And for the Prank King title, in advance.”  
  
He winked, _actually fucking winked,_ and was gone before Emerald had a chance to retaliate, bounding down the path to the cave at top speed.

Wait. Why was he going down there? He could trap Tyrian just fine from here, it wasn’t safe to go down there alone.

_He’s not alone._

Emerald didn’t know what Mercury was planning, but she did know that she’d pick off every Grimm that got within twenty feet of him with _Thief’s Respite,_ the fact that it wasn’t designed to function as a sniper be damned. She let the bags fall to the rock, and she stepped forward with her guns drawn, peering down over the shielding wall. Mercury had vanished into the cave. The Grimm bubbling out of the Pits were beginning to turn toward the rock formation, claws dragging the ground, Beowulves and Ursai growling as they closed in on Mercury’s ambush point.

What the fuck was he playing at? He needed to get out of there, and fast.

Far to Emerald’s left, a white speck came rushing down another path from the Keep. Tyrian, his metal tail gleaming under the purple-red light.

The Grimm were hemming in the entrance to the cave, arriving even faster than Tyrian.

_Merc, get out of there._ Emerald didn’t want to be panicking, she really didn’t, but if she had to run alone now and leave him like this—

She couldn’t.

Tyrian vaulted over an Ursa that was flanking the cave and zipped into the entrance just as Mercury came rocketing out of the hole in the roof, propelled by a burst of air dust. Mercury went springing up the cliff face, vaulting from rock to rock like a mountain goat, and then dealt a two-footed kick to the narrow spire of stone that was the only thing keeping the boulders from cascading down the mountain. In a flash of white aura, it was obliterated, and Mercury was flipping free of the avalanche and landing on the path to sprint back up toward her as the boulders thundered down the slope.

Through the roof of the cave, Emerald just had time to see yellow eyes widen in surprise and confusion before the boulders struck home and destroyed any escape route Tyrian might have that didn’t lead through a hoard of Grimm.

Mercury landed at Emerald’s side, moving so quickly that a windstorm seemed to follow him, stirring her hair.

“Gods,” she said, looking down at the seething mass of blackness beneath her, the worry still burning through her making her incapable of downplaying her reaction. “You didn’t fuck around.”

“Oh, that’s not the best part,” said Mercury, leaning against the wall beside her. “Watch.”  
  
Incapable of tearing her eyes away, Emerald did. So she saw, when, with a faint, pathetic trumpeting sound, a spray of confetti shot out of the mouth of the cave.

Emerald’s jaw dropped, and she smacked Mercury in the arm. “Thief!”

Mercury snorted. “Pot, kettle, Em.”  
  
“Confetti in the gauntlets is _my_ thing!” She could barely keep from laughing.

Mercury was grinning, too. “What? Do you want me to pay you royalties or something?”

“You _did_ infringe on my copyright,” said Emerald.

“I’m about to infringe on your crown,” he said smugly.

Shit. It was two to one, and there was no one left to prank.

Fuck.

She was _not_ carrying the luggage.

But whatever she came up with, she’d have to come up with fast, because, from the far side of the Keep, came the telltale ominous hum of a portal opening.

Emerald looked at Mercury to find him looking right back at her.

“The bullhead,” they both said, and then Mercury was grabbing her bag of luggage, and she was slinging his over her shoulder, and they were running full-speed back up the slope toward the Keep.

As they gained the level ground again, their pace sped up, when—

The wind ruffled Emerald’s hair, and on pure instinct, she careened into Mercury and shoved him down, flattening them both to the ground.

The Nevermore’s talons missed them by inches.

_“Fuck,_ I hate this place,” Mercury said, but the Nevermore was already swooping down toward the Pits and the cave.

Emerald breathed out a sigh, too relieved to lift herself up from Mercury’s chest. In the crash to the ground, his arm had fallen around her waist, and he radiated warmth against the freezing wind.

So, she didn’t bother to lift her head from its place under his chin when she asked. “How the hell did you get that many Grimm to swarm that place?”  
  
She felt his shoulders lift in a shrug.

“It’s not like negative emotions are tricky for me,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of material to work with.”

Emerald frowned. “But—but they didn’t follow you.”

“Tyrian was pissed enough when he got there and pieced it together that he’s plenty of a beacon for them,” Mercury said.

“But none of them even split off for you—that Nevermore barely saw us. How—how did you turn it around that fast?”

“Oh, that was easy,” Mercury said, and Emerald could feel the laughter humming against her ear as it moved up from his chest to his throat, and his arm wrapped more securely around her waist, “I just thought about—”

He tensed up suddenly and shoved Emerald off of him, stumbling to his feet. The winds felt even colder now, and Emerald wrapped her arms around herself.

_Stupid._

Gods, if there was only there was a way to _know_. That her mind wasn’t playing tricks on her.

That he cared.

That fucking anyone cared.

“Nothing,” Mercury said. “Now let’s get to that bullhead.”

Emerald followed after him as he turned his back on her and gods, gods, gods, she needed some way to prove that he would always turn back around. She couldn’t trust herself, but there had to be something she _could_ trust, right?

And as they sprinted up through the darkness, Emerald realized how she could keep her crown. There _was_ still one person left to prank.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I'm excited to post the conclusion to this, hopefully sometime in the next few weeks.


End file.
